Guest post by John Kehr
With two completed months of the year there is starting to be discussion of how 2013 is shaping up for the annual anomaly. Several comments around the web have caught my attention as they demonstrate a basic misunderstanding of how the Earth’s climate is behaving. This is one of those articles that may seem OCD, but this one misunderstanding is what allows warmists to get away with as much as they do when it comes to climate.
I am going to pick on Anthony Watts and Roy Spencer for this one. The article in question was the one where Roy Spencer provided an update of the UAH anomaly. Here is a screen shot of the article.
From March 4th, 2013
The title states that there was a big drop in surface temperature in the month of February from ~ 0.5 to 0.2 °C. This is correct for the anomaly, but it has nothing to do with the Earth’s temperature. The reality is the Earth warmed up, but the anomaly dropped.
Let me explain. January is the coldest month of the year for the planet as a whole. Depending on the source, the average temperature is between 12.0 and 12.5 °C for the month. February is on average 0.18 °C warmer than January, also source dependent. Here is what the basic generic behavior of the Earth is on an annual basis.
Illustration 1: Annual Temperature of the Earth and the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The average temperature of the Earth is different for each month of the year.
This is based on the average from the 1900-1990 data and I have used this extensively as the baseline behavior for the Earth today. Anomaly has no place on this chart because this shows the actual temperature of the Earth and each hemisphere. How the seasons affect the global average is readily apparent. To me it also shows how many factors can influence the global anomaly. January and February are perfect examples of this.
If I switch to Weatherbell I can show some cool graphics that they produce.
Here is January and February of 2013 from their site.
Notice that the Earth is about 0.25 °C warmer in February, but since it was closer to average the anomaly was much less. Climate scientists hate it when people show real temperature because it is impossible to see much warming when you look at the seasonal changes in the actual temperature.
Now for something interesting. In January the anomaly in the Arctic was well above average. By simple physics that meant the Arctic was losing energy to space at a much higher rate than average. Normally the Arctic is losing energy at a rate of 163 W/m^2. In January of 2013 it was losing energy at a rate of 173 W/m^2. That 6% increase in rate of energy loss meant that the Arctic ended up with a negative anomaly in February. The dramatic change in Arctic anomaly played a big role in the drop of the global anomaly in February.
The rate of energy loss is a self-correcting mechanism. Physics don’t allow it to operate in any other way. As a whole the Earth lost ~ 4 W/m^2 more than average over the entire surface in the month of January. Data for February is not yet available, but it will be close to average because the anomaly was closer to average. The higher rate of energy loss in January resulted in a more average February. That is how the climate operates.
Finally I have to get a dig in at CO2. In January of 2013 it was 395 ppm and in 1985 it was 50 points lower at 345 ppm. So despite the fact that CO2 was higher, the Earth was losing energy at a higher rate to space. CO2 was not blocking the energy from escaping despite all the claims that increased CO2 prevents heat from escaping the Earth. The Earth 30 years later was losing a significantly larger amount of energy to space than it was in the past.
Science, ignore at your own peril.
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rgbatduke says:
March 12, 2013 at 2:49 pm
“Of the photons that are reradiated back into the cavity, some of them miss the central sphere and are absorbed again by some other part of the shell….”
Are they? I mean, significantly on average? Huygens’ Construction appears to argue that the wavefront would collapse toward the center, like the implosion of an atom bomb, which suggests that the photon distribution would converge essentially to a spherically collapsing wavefront. I think you can probably make a first order approximation that, in steady state, it is effectively all going back to the central sphere.
@Bart says:
March 12, 2013 at 10:18 am
Mario Lento says:
March 11, 2013 at 4:23 pm
+++++++
I can see that I misunderstood… that’s what I get for reading too fast.
RGB: Heat doesn’t flow from cold to hot, so, the shell never sends heat to the planet, and so it never warms up the planet. The shell just will come to the same temperature as the source, the planet. Then the shell effectively becomes the new surface of the planet, and this doesn’t require the planet to become hotter. There’s no need to invent that. The presence of a temperature differential does not mean that the hotter side of the differential gets hotter – it means that the cooler side warms up until equilibrium is established with the hotter side. This does not require the hotter side to get hotter.
Micro: Hands warmed inside gloves is a sense-perception result of reduced convective air cooling. Put your hand inside a mirror, say, a shell with a mirrored interior, and the hand will not warm up. Put it next to a mirror and the side facing the mirror will not heat up.
Temperature and radiation is all about frequency. Hotter matter vibrates at higher frequency, producing higher frequency radiation. Commensurately, higher frequency radiation falling onto matter with lower frequency vibration components will induce higher frequency vibration in the material, thus heating it up. Because higher frequencies are being introduced. You need higher frequency radiation to induce higher temperature. This is how and why radiation obeys the laws of thermodynamics, so that radiation of a particular frequency spectrum (temperature) can not induce higher frequency vibration (temperature) in matter it falls on, including its own source as a pertinent example. This is exactly the same thing as how two objects of the same temperature can not induce higher temperature in each other via conduction.
Joseph E Postma says:
March 12, 2013 at 5:09 pm
“Absorption of a photon can’t induce higher temperature, i.e., material vibration frequencies, than the photon actually is.”
OK, now the quantum nature of what you are trying to get across is coming into view. It’s not entirely true, but I believe substantially so.
It appears to me you are suggesting that the surface IR class energy levels are all, or at least substantially, occupied, so that a back-radiated photon is basically just going to hit the surface and get reflected back up with no transfer of energy. Is that right?
If so, supposing you could make that argument on the day side of the planet, what about the night side?
Joseph E Postma says:
March 12, 2013 at 5:09 pm
My previous post hasn’t appear yet, but the issue I raised was:
“It appears to me you are suggesting that the surface IR class energy levels are all, or at least substantially, occupied, so that a back-radiated photon is basically just going to hit the surface and get reflected back up with no transfer of energy.”
I will assume this is what Joe is suggesting until he informs me otherwise. Surely there is a way to get a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the available energy levels, and how full they get due to the continuous application of sunlight. I’m just coming to grips with what I think Joe is saying, and feeling my way around here. I appears to me that this could be a limiting factor on how much effect the GHE might have, at least on the daylight side of the planet, but how close the limit is, is not something I instantaneously have a handle on.
But, I do believe no stone should be left unturned, and every suggestion should be carefully considered, because the GHE of CO2 on surface temperatures is just plain MIA. There is no indication of any deviation from the underlying pattern which has been extant for over a century. Some thing or some things about the currently accepted reasoning is/are wrong, so we need to unhinge our minds a little from the orthodoxy in order to gain better understanding.
Bart says:
March 12, 2013 at 6:53 pm
Here’s my opinion, and an area I’m going to do more research on.
The temp of the DLR is far less than the surface temp(Using SB to convert temp to w/m2 and back as required). The temp of the DLR represents what the surface radiates to. As I’ve mentioned, on a clear sky 35F day, it was ~-41F. A doubling of Co2 will raise this temp by ~1.2C (~1.8w/m2 increase). So instead of the surface radiating heat to say -41.2C, it will after doubling radiate to -40C.
All of the GCM results are referencing changes to that temp, not surface temps.
The second part of this is that I have read (and intend to start taking actual measurements) that in warm weather the temp of the DLR is only 10-20C colder than the surface. The difference between the 40C some degrees I’ve measured and the 10-20C referenced is the addition of water vapor at warmer temps.
Since surface records show no loss of nightly cooling, any change in the DLR from Co2, must be compensated for by slight reductions in water vapor.
Well everything I’ve written above should be enough to provide the physical explanation and description of what occurs at the “quantum” level. Your (Bart) summary is essentially correct, but my description is more complete.
I totally agree with your last comment, and think it is perfect:
“the GHE of CO2 on surface temperatures is just plain MIA. There is no indication of any deviation from the underlying pattern which has been extant for over a century. Some thing or some things about the currently accepted reasoning is/are wrong, so we need to unhinge our minds a little from the orthodoxy in order to gain better understanding.”
Also recall that, and in reference to this “shell game” explanation, there is always the assumption of 235 W/m^2 (-18C) solar input. This is the primary, originating error from which all (many) other errors follow, and from which other things have needed to be invented. The Sun does *not* input 235 W/m^2 (-18C); it inputs on a hemisphere, with an integrated average equivalent temperature value of +49C, which has a maximum of +90C around the solar zenith.
Are they? I mean, significantly on average? Huygens’ Construction appears to argue that the wavefront would collapse toward the center, like the implosion of an atom bomb, which suggests that the photon distribution would converge essentially to a spherically collapsing wavefront. I think you can probably make a first order approximation that, in steady state, it is effectively all going back to the central sphere.
times warmer. Nice, neat, simple to compute.
with 
the polar angle (away from normal), but it could be purely Lambertian emission, uniform into the half space. I somewhat doubt that because the emission isn’t actually from a perfect surface but from some frequency dependent skin depth near the surface and there should be some interference from traversing longer paths through the material out towards the sides. What it won’t be is purely directionally inward, however pretty it makes the models. (I looked in Petty to see if he had this worked out already, but he doesn’t. He does allude in a few places to assumptions made about the directional character of outgoing radiation in the context of e.g. multiple scattering near the tropopause where the atmosphere starts to become transparent to IR.)
meters, and the radius of the interpolated absorber layer is $R_a = 1.001 \times R_e$ — the rough length scales relevant to Earth and atmosphere — the geometric factor is irrelevant and one is back to a “plane” approximation where one has 
up and down. But then life is so very much more complicated in a real atmosphere, because the heating is diurnal from a 
K near-point source that hits the Earth on a spherical, rotating surface that is 70% covered with salt water, a highly variable 30% or so covered at any given time with high albedo clouds, a few percent covered with high albedo ice and snow, where the axis of rotation is tipped relative to the ecliptic and the orbit itself is moderately eccentric, enough to cause an annual variation of almost 100 W/m^2 difference in TOA normal insolation all by itself. Then there is the complexity of atmospheric transport of heat, oceanic transport and trapping and mixing of heat, the enormously complex spectral complexity of all of the optically active molecules in the atmosphere (where all of the molecules IN the atmosphere are optically active somewhere in the relevant SW through LW bands).
Hi Bart,
When I first built this toy model as specific proof that the assertion of Pierre Latour — that an increase in temperature of a steadily heated body by interpolating a cooler layer of opaque mass (but warmer than 3K) between that body and the 3 K “reservoir” of outer space minus the sun violated the second law of thermodynamics — is false, I assumed that in dynamical equilibrium there would be 2P coming out of the central body (P from external heat, P from back radiation), 2P going into the interpolated shell from the central mass, and 2P coming out of the interpolated shell (P in and P out). Net outflow is P, matching the net external inflow, but the central mass has to lose twice as much energy per unit time and hence has to be
Sadly, then I thought about it some more. Blackbody radiation coming out of a small/differential plane surface probably isn’t isotropic, but it isn’t directional. It is also pure thermal radiation, and hence very nearly maximally incoherent. Huygens presumes monochromatic coherent light. If I had to guess, the radiation pattern might perhaps be
This doesn’t really make any difference at all to the two points of the model — that the GHE does not violate any laws of thermodynamics, and that a colder (but warmer than 3 K) opaque absorber layer surrounding any more or less continuously heated object in space will cause that object’s mean temperature to rise so that there is nothing in principle nonphysical about an atmospheric GHE associated with the seriously saturated, opaque, CO_2 in the atmosphere. This mostly is an argument aimed directly at Latour himself (who promised to go away and think about it when I communicated it to him, but I never heard from him again so I guess he didn’t like these particular thoughts) or anyone else incapable of looking at TOA and BOA IR spectrographs and going yup, there’s a GHE all right, end of story. The “violates the second law” argument is beyond bad, it is just plain terrible physics.
The notion that “a trace gas” can’t cause the effect is equally bogus, given the rather short mean free path of an IR photon in any of the CO_2 coupled bands — the reason the GHE varies so little with additional CO_2 is that it is already saturated, and as somebody (perhaps it was Petty himself in his book, can’t remember exactly) pointed out, once you’ve painted a window so that it is almost completely opaque, it doesn’t become a lot opaquer if you add another layer of paint.
One can easily “fix” the geometry problem, of course. In particular, if the radius of the sphere is
Different GHGs are differently opaque at different heights in different windows and become (partially, increasingly) transparent at different heights as well so radiation to space on the far side of the opaque lower layers occurs in depth, not at anything like a nice sharp surface. Heat both diffuses up in the form of radiation and is actively transported up and down in the form of warm or cold air masses and in the form of latent heat in e.g. water vapour or liquid, is carried here and there across the surface by vagrant but large scale air movements so that one day we are chilled by arctic winds, the next warmed by moist gulf breezes, and neither one represents what’s going on with insolation and radiative loss here and now, but at some time in the past and some place far from here, where what happened there was similarly influenced by something even farther in the past and from yet another place.
In the end, while I fully believe that there is a hell of a lot of atmospheric radiation physics, fully coupled to not one but two coupled Navier-Stokes fluid systems, strongly constrained by geography, whipped around by coriolis forces, confounded by all of the feedbacks and latent heats associated with water, and sure, tweaked here and there by human contributions to the overall composition and chemistry, I very seriously doubt our ability to meaningfully solve the problem of long term climate forecasting in anything like a predictive way. Getting one thing wrong in the model is enough to make all your predictions totally incorrect, not wrong by “a little” as one might expect for simple, nearly linear systems but radically wrong in the way only chaotic nonlinear systems can be when you aren’t dead on the money, so wrong that you might as well consider the answer you get to be output from a very large, very complex random number generator with a seed consisting of your initial conditions and assumptions. What I find difficult to understand is why it is so difficult for climate scientists to openly acknowledge this uncertainty, given that they can’t start their OWN models with neighboring but distinct initial conditions and end up with anything like the same answers two times in a row, when the GCMs themselves significantly disagree depending on how they are written and initialized.
I don’t think that they appreciate the risk they have taken with their credibility, because nothing is going to change the way the climate really does evolve in the near future, not their models or their beliefs or for that matter, mine. It’s one thing to make a computer-educated, modeled guess, and openly acknowledge that your guess has anybody’s guess chance of being right; it’s quite another to assert that it is almost certain to be correct and we can safely bet the present and future prosperity of the entire planet on the predictions — oops, they’re not predictions, are they, only “projections”, that these not-really-predictions of catastrophe were maybe possibly 95% certain yesterday, could be 80% certain today, who knows how certain they will be tomorrow…
rgb
Heat doesn’t flow from cold to hot, so, the shell never sends heat to the planet, and so it never warms up the planet.
Net heat doesn’t flow from cold to hot. And I have to say, your assertion that the molecules of some material at any temperature are smart enough to refuse to radiate in a certain direction because somewhere over there there might be a warmer body is laughably absurd. Or is this some sort of complex joke?
As you yourself put it — the shell is at a finite temperature. It is made up of charged matter. Ergo, it radiates. It radiates in, it radiates out. It does not care what is inside of it or what is outside of it, it radiates. It’s what charged particles do when they are bouncing around with thermal energy. This radiation is utterly non-directional.
You have now crossed the boundary from being halfway sensible to being senseless. I’ve already walked you step by step through the actual entropy computation to show that entropy safely increases in the Universe as heat flows in to the system, moves through the shell, and ends up at infinity at 3 K. Indeed, as long as the shell is in dynamic equilibrium, its entropy does not change at all — its heat content and temperature are constant.
rgb
That two spectrums exist, one from a cooler body and one from a warmer, and that there is a temperature differential, does not mean that the hotter side of the differential warms up. That’s backwards. Skin can detect temperature changes on the order of what, 1/10th, 1/2 of a degree K? If backradiation could warm you up, you should be able to instantly feel it on your skin when you stand in front of a mirror. Backradiation is supposed to produce 50%, doublings, etc., of temperature increases. Talking 10’s of degrees K, hundreds of degrees K even. But it can’t actually even be detected at the skin sensitivity level of less than 1K. That is because the concept is physically impossible, given the explanation of frequency components and heat transfer etc.
Joseph,
” That two spectrums exist, one from a cooler body and one from a warmer, and that there is a temperature differential, does not mean that the hotter side of the differential warms up. That’s backwards. Skin can detect temperature changes on the order of what, 1/10th, 1/2 of a degree K? If backradiation could warm you up, you should be able to instantly feel it on your skin when you stand in front of a mirror. Backradiation is supposed to produce 50%, doublings, etc., of temperature increases. Talking 10′s of degrees K, hundreds of degrees K even. But it can’t actually even be detected at the skin sensitivity level of less than 1K. That is because the concept is physically impossible, given the explanation of frequency components and heat transfer etc.”
Science is both theoretical, and experimental, and some times a few simple measurements will guide you better than months of writing out equations will ever do. I don’t feel the ir from my hand in a mirror, is it because my hand isn’t sensitive enough, or that there’s a layer of glass between my hand and the actual reflector, i don’t know, but I know for a fact the ir is there, and it would be read with an ir thermometer.
You can protest all you want that there’s no ir reflected(in a proper ir reflector), but you’re wrong.
Micro: “You can protest all you want that there’s no ir reflected(in a proper ir reflector), but you’re wrong.”
My statements had nothing to do with saying that there is no IR reflection, so this objection is moot, sorry. There is IR reflection and emission from cold sources, certainly, but the nature of this radiative energy can not cause heating on its own source or a hotter source, for the reasons I’ve physically described several times. Radiation obeys the laws of thermodynamics too – not just the first one, but all of them.
Joseph E Postma says:
March 13, 2013 at 6:58 am
Then I suggest you try to be more careful in your statements, as every time this was mentioned you claimed it wasn’t true.
This is wrong, there is an exchange of energy, but the increase is compensated for by an equal amount of radiation. Nicely balances out to at the macroscopic level to equate to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd laws.
Yes it does, all of them. They’re the same thing, TD is the macroscopic view, SB is the quantum view of the same effect.
Well, simply please don’t read in to my statements and “create words in my mouth” which are obviously wrong strawmen.
You said:
“JP “There is IR reflection and emission from cold sources, certainly, but the nature of this radiative energy can not cause heating on its own source or a hotter source, for the reasons I’ve physically described several times.”
Micro: This is wrong, there is an exchange of energy, but the increase is compensated for by an equal amount of radiation. Nicely balances out to at the macroscopic level to equate to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd laws.”
Note, once again, that I did not say that there is no exchange of radiation. I said there is, right in the first sentence. Of course, without the frequency components required to do so, radiation can not induce higher temperature in material than the frequency components that the radiation actually is. This is why and how radiation obeys the set of thermodynamics laws.
The presence of a temperature differential doesn’t mean that the hotter side of the differential gets hotter. That’s backwards. 100% backwards. It is not about directionality – radiation goes everywhere. It is about what the radiation is capable of doing, which is a function of its spectrum. It can’t do more than its spectrum says it can. It can’t create higher temperature than the temperature it is. This is how and why radiation obeys the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the 2nd, given that directionality is not known. Directionality might not be known, but it doesn’t need to be. What is known, what becomes known, are the frequency components when the photon and matter interact. If the radiation is of the same or cooler spectrum than the matter, it can’t induce any higher frequency components and therefore higher temperature in the matter.
I will assume this is what Joe is suggesting until he informs me otherwise. Surely there is a way to get a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the available energy levels, and how full they get due to the continuous application of sunlight. I’m just coming to grips with what I think Joe is saying, and feeling my way around here. I appears to me that this could be a limiting factor on how much effect the GHE might have, at least on the daylight side of the planet, but how close the limit is, is not something I instantaneously have a handle on.
So why not invest a few bucks in a copy of Petty’s A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation and actually learn something? As for CO_2 being “MIA” — why would you say this? Nearly all of the warming produced by CO_2 is a done deal. We’re dealing with small variations because it is already saturated, additional CO_2 is just making nearly completely opaque nearly completely opaquer, but there isn’t a lot of ROOM on the way to the goal line there. Bear in mind that the Ordovician-Silurian ice age occurred with CO_2 levels between 4000 and 7000 ppm, nearly 20 times what they’ve been over the last fifty years at peak. At best, CO_2 is around 5% of the total GHE and we’re talking tiny variations of that 5% even from doubling of the concentration.
IMO the real difficulty with the CO_2 linked GHE isn’t that it isn’t real, it certainly doesn’t violate the second law, it absolutely is responsible for some fraction of the surface warming we observe relative to a hypothetical greybody with the approximately correct albedo and emissivity, and if you doubt these things, buy Petty’s book and work your way through the BOA and TOA spectrographs as they are direct photographic evidence that this is all true. The real difficulty is that in a highly complex nonlinear system that is stabilized, if anything, primarily by WATER both liquid and vapor and cloud and ice, the “direct” marginal action of increasing CO_2 could be anything from enhanced to completely canceled by water alone. The data isn’t inconsistent with roughly 0.1 C/decade warming that might, in fact, be associated with CO_2 increases. Or might not. It is too early to tell. We’ve only had halfway decent measurements of SOME of the most relevant parameters for at MOST 50 years, and in many cases (e.g. LTT or ocean temperatures) for a bit more than 30 years. We’re still learning a LOT about the Sun — most of what we thought we knew about e.g. historical solar activity levels a few decades ago appears to be largely in error.
There is plenty of room for CO_2 to be harmless — or not — without resorting to absurdity. On either side of the debate. Asserting that there is “no” CO_2 linked GHE when TOA spectrographs directly prove otherwise is absurd. Arguing that the atmosphere doesn’t radiate IR downwards because it is “cooler than the surface” — when there are spectrographs in abundance that are direct experimental observations to the contrary — is absurd. Let’s try to keep the skeptical side of the debate from turning to the absurd in order to reinforce doubt. It doesn’t work very well, not in the long run.
rgb
A spectrograph of a cold source does mean that cold radiation can warm up something warmer. This does not mean that radiation doesn’t emit in all directions, it means that cold can not heat hot. We can get spectrograph readings from ice cubes too; this does not mean that ice cubes heat up hot water with their radiation. Radiation obeys thermodynamics too – a source can not heat itself with its own radiation and cold can not induce higher temperatures in something warmer.
Joseph E Postma says:
March 12, 2013 at 8:52 pm…
Excellent comment in just a few words. Agree completely.
rgbatduke says:
March 12, 2013 at 7:43 pm
“Huygens presumes monochromatic coherent light.”
If I recall my Fourier Optics correctly (it has been a while), these are not actually required for a reasonable approximation. Indeed, Huygens principle was first used to predict diffraction of sunlight through a pinhole. This does tend to make the transmitted light nominally coherent, but obviously not monochromatic. Incoherent light can be treated statistically, but things do get smudged out…
A Lambertian point distribution would be very dependent on surface roughness and wavelength…
Oh well, have to give it more thought. But, common sense (which, admittedly, sometimes can lead us astray) says that the intensity is going to increase dramatically the closer you get to the planet surface. And, of course, as the separation of the shell from the surface becomes small, the planet fills the entire field of view from any given point on the interior of the shell.
“The “violates the second law” argument is beyond bad, it is just plain terrible physics.”
Definitely agree. Net heat transfer is still always from warm to cold. Mostly, the misapprehension seems to stem from a confusion between Watts and Joules. Heat isn’t actually moving from a cooler place to a warmer place, it is simply being briefly prevented from leaving the warmer place. There is no 2nd law violation. However, that just says the GHE is not wrong on this basis, not that it is right.
“I don’t think that they appreciate the risk they have taken with their credibility…”
It is mind boggling. But, what really bothers me is, it isn’t just their credibility they have wagered, it is that of all scientifically oriented endeavors, of which I am a participant. In effect, they embezzled capital from my account, and yours and others posting here, and bet it all on not just one, but many rolls of the dice (such as you describe nicely in the preceding), gambling it all that they wouldn’t come up snake eyes on any throw.
rgbatduke says:
March 12, 2013 at 8:34 pm
“So why not invest a few bucks in a copy of Petty’s A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation and actually learn something?”
Does he address this specific question? If so, it would be more helpful to give a page reference than strike a tone. Look, I’ve already gone on record saying I have no problem with the GHE as stated. But, I want to be sure I understand precisely Joe’s objection, and can either agree with or dismiss it. I cannot say off the top of my head whether IR absorbers on the surface would generally be near saturation or not during daylight, so I feel I would need to nail that down before moving forward. I can make an assumption, based on what I feel is probable, but I prefer to be certain of my conclusions.
“As for CO_2 being “MIA” — why would you say this?”
OK, delta-CO2, if you prefer. I thought that was obvious in context. The predicted effect of increased CO2 concentration over the 20th century and up to the present day on globally averaged temperature is MIA.
“…the “direct” marginal action of increasing CO_2 could be anything from…”
This is what I have been arguing, that the sensitivity function is not monotonic, and it is not a given that adding more CO2 will automatically enhance the GHE.
“…when TOA spectrographs directly prove otherwise is absurd…”
That is pretty compelling. Can we think of any other explanation for the gaps in TOA radiation? Offhand, I cannot, but I will keep on considering it until the mystery is cleared up.
Look, I’m not kidding. Something is seriously wrong with expectations. Temperatures haven’t budged from pre-existing patterns while CO2 went up markedly in the 20th century. Is it because, as you say, the window is already opaque? And, if so, why did the Climate Change Mafia miss such an elementary consideration?
I don’t think he was saying there is no IR reflected… that is absurd.
I think he was saying reflected IR (as well as re-radiated IR) is subtracted from the energy leaving the source, not added to it.
As an example: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/imgheat/stef3.gif
Stefan-Boltzmann Law
“If the hot object is radiating energy to its cooler surroundings at temperature Tc, the net radiation loss rate takes the form:
P = ε σ A (T_hot⁴ – T_cold⁴)” ~From the above link
Modeling of Radiative Cooling Time
Here’s an interactive demonstration: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/StefanBoltzmannLaw/
Max™ says:
March 12, 2013 at 11:44 pm
Exactly!
For the net heat flow it is subtraction, 2 identical objects each at the same temp has no transfer of heat, but they both radiate the exact same number of watts at each other, and nothing stops the item from absorbing the radiation falling on it heating the object. But at the same time the increased heat causes it to radiate more, so it all balances out.
Think of 2 10 gal aquariums with 2 pumps that transfers 1 gal /hour, each pumping water from one to the other. even though they both stay at 10 gal’s, there is a flow from each to the other. It’s exchanging water between tanks.
The heat exchanged by radiation works the same way.
Now imagine a third pump (call it Sun) adding water to one of the tanks(call it tank earth), and the other two pumps output based on the volume of water in the tank it’s pumping from. Finally add a pump (call this one Space) to the tank we’ll call sky pumping water out down the drain at the same rate as the third pump adding water to tank earth. In this example you’d have stable water levels, but water would be getting exchanged in and out of both tanks.
But image Pump Sun is a high volume pump that runs only 50% of the time, and the other 3 pumps all run based on the water level in the two tanks. That’d probably make a great visual experiment showing the flow of heat in the Earth, Sun, Space system.
rgbatduke says:
March 12, 2013 at 8:34 pm
“…the BOA and TOA spectrographs as they are direct photographic evidence that this is all true…”
Let’s get a little more detail on these spectrographs. Were they taken during daylight or nighttime? Winter, Spring, Summer and/or Fall? Over the tropics? Over the poles? Are they an average of samples? Over how long an interval? Years apart? How many? How often?
The answers to these questions might reveal more about the character of the effect, when and where it is occurring, and what, precisely, the evidence establishes, as well as what it does not.
Way too much has been taken for granted by the protagonists in the debate, and they are on the cusp of reaping what is sure to be a tragic and humiliating reward for their folly. If we want to get a preview of the bloodbath to come and stay on top of the game, we should attempt to fill in some of the gaps they skipped over in their headlong rush to judgment.
No heat energy is transferred from cold to hot or between two objects of equal temperature. Remember, we can *not* say that in a temperature differential, the hotter side has to get hotter in order to warm the cool side. Rather, the cool side just warms up. No net energy flows from the shell to the planet. The best the planet can do is heat the shell to the same temperature of the planet, and then the shell essentially becomes the new surface of the planet, emitting the 235. Between the planet and shell is a radiation field of 235, and so there’s that energy there going “back and forth” between them, but it doesn’t cause heating once equilibrium is established because it intrinsically doesn’t contain the higher energy frequency components required to do so., required to induce higher frequency material vibrations and hence higher temperature. It just can’t do it. As the shell then loses the 235 continuously to outer space, this is continuously replaced by the radiation field between the planet and shell, and the energy loss in that radiation field is replaced by the planet.
We already discovered that the “shells game” idea violates thermodynamics when considering the physical effects of the interior sphere having a high metal expansion coefficient, and the shell a low one, and what would occur when they touched.
Mod, not sure why, but I think my last post went into the spam (?) bucket, as it didn’t get posted as waiting for mod.
“For the net heat flow it is subtraction, 2 identical objects each at the same temp has no transfer of heat, but they both radiate the exact same number of watts at each other, and nothing stops the item from absorbing the radiation falling on it heating the object. But at the same time the increased heat causes it to radiate more, so it all balances out.” ~MiCro
>.>
Two objects at the same temperature do indeed exchange radiation, but they do not exchange heat, i.e. neither object will raise the temperature of the other object.
It’s strange though, I don’t think anyone here would disagree with me if I said the transfer of heat by conduction is greater between a hot and cold region than two regions at nearly the same temperature.
Similarly I do not think anyone would disagree if I said convection transports more heat upwards when the ground is hot and the air is cold than it does when the air has warmed up to nearly the same temperature as the ground.
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Yet when someone claims radiation is more effective at transferring heat between two bodies when one is much warmer than the other and far less effective when the bodies are nearly the same temperature, for some reason it no longer seems plausible.
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The cold end of a rod doesn’t back-conduct and raise the temperature of the heated end.
The cold atmosphere doesn’t down-vect and raise the temperature of the air near the surface.
Yet cold bodies emitting radiation towards warmer bodies are supposed to add to the energy supply of said warmer body and cause it to heat up, even in cases where the warmer body was responsible for raising the temperature of the colder body in the first place?
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Yes, a colder surface does indeed radiate back towards the warmer surface, and yes, the warmer surface does absorb that radiation, that is indeed the case.
We take a typical example:
A cold surface@225 K radiating 145 W/m^2 back towards a warm surface@255 K radiating 239 W/m^2 towards the cold surface.
Does that mean:
a) the warm surface (which is receiving 239 W/m^2 from another source) is now receiving 384 W/m^2 and begins warming up towards 287 K (at which point it would emit 384 W/m^2)
or
b) the warm surface (again, receiving 239 W/m^2 from another source) is now only losing 94 W/m^2 and cools at an ever slower rate as the temperature differential with the cold surface shrinks, with both bodies tending towards a state in which the two bodies equilibrate with the energy input to the warmer body and the temperature of the surroundings
Joseph E Postma says:
March 12, 2013 at 1:19 pm
“Consider the planet to have a high metal expansion coefficient, and the sphere a small one. There is a small distance between them. When the planet heats up to 470, it will expand and touch the shell. Now the shell will heat up to 470. Whereas before we couldn’t, say, create steam to drive a generator turbine, now we can (using the relevant values). You get the idea I hope. The system might cool and stop touching but then it would just heat up again and touch again. With an intrinsic source that couldn’t create steam in the first place, with a system of shells the system can now do more work than it could have in the first place, if the input energy was just used directly. Just by using a passive shell. Obviously that has problems of the thermodynamics type.
The amount of work the system can do does not change in this scenario, it just has a different timeline. And, putting in a threshold to create steam is arbitrary.
If I may make an electrical analogy, let’s put an ideal current source “I” running through a resistor “R” to ground creating 0.6 V according to V = IR. There is a diode in parallel (analogous to your steam) which switches on at 0.7 V. According to your scenario, there is no way I can make the diode switch on and carry current which could drive a load. But, that is not true. If I put a capacitor in series with the resistor, the voltage will increase until the diode is activated, at which point, the voltage will be pegged to 0.7 V (or, in the real world with realizable components, engage in a limit cycle around 0.7 V). If the diode were not there, and the capacitor ideal, the voltage would increase indefinitely, but all real capacitors are actually lossy and can only hold so much charge, so there would be an ultimate limit at which the voltage would either settle out, or the capacitor would explode.
But, in any case, a load put in series with the diode could do work it could not before, but there is no violation of physical laws. The capacitor simply stores up the incoming energy until such a time as the accumulated voltage can trip the diode, and work can then be done through it.
Joseph E Postma says:
March 13, 2013 at 8:53 am
You keep saying this, but that doesn’t makes it correct. SB obeys TD because SD is just the quantum view of TD.
Max™ says:
March 13, 2013 at 9:53 am
“The cold end of a rod doesn’t back-conduct and raise the temperature of the heated end.”
But, if you reduce the surface area of the cold end, the gradient in the heated end will decrease, and it will be hotter on average.
“putting in a threshold to create steam is arbitrary.”
No, we’re talking about an entirely different phase state of matter, a phase change, which would require a certain energy input threshold in the first place to achieve. With a lesser input than that, some form of auto-amplification occurs to achieve what couldn’t be achieved previously, and with only a passive change in the system. It is getting more with less, in energetic input/output terms, and is a violation of thermodynamic limitations.